I've setup Crowdrender just today and it's pretty cool! My main PC, a gaming laptop is running as loud and hot as ever, task manager agrees that it working really hard when rendering, like normal. But, both of my nodes (older gaming laptops) are running cool and quiet, task manager showing both of them with a CPU load of 20% when rendering, close to zero when not. TM also shows the Nvidia cards near zero when rendering, too. I have both set to CUDA (which seems to help speed greatly VS. CPU), but, I can tell the two nodes aren't working hard at all. They're cold and quiet. Any suggestions?
(Win 10, Blender 2.8, all three laptops are I7s from 3rd gen to 7th. All have Nvidia cards.)
Yep, same problem here. I downloaded today the last version of crowdrender. No GPU rendering with both computers set on CUDA only. I also tried different combinations with CPU and GPU but no luck. I render faster on one computer using only the GPU than 2 computers on CPU. I run Win 10 on both computers also. System is up to date. I really thought is going to cut my rendering time in half this add-on. Setback. Not sure why is that.
Windows 10 ver. 1903 seems to have done it! My nodes are showing hard working CPUs now. This is NOT, unfortunately, giving a very big performance boost. I suppose the GPUs were working fine all along, and if you've read my previous findings in this thread, compared with GPUs, the CPUs are not adding a lot of muscle, relatively. But, it's good to hear the fans winding up in the node computers, they show a lot of CPU utilization now that both are fully up to date. THANK YOU!
Hi there.. :D
Ok, so you're running win 10? There is a known issue with our software running on win 10, we've just discovered it actually. The problem appears to be, oddly enough, that windows implemented some form of protection against the now fairly famous SPECTRE vulnerability. There has been an update for win 10 out since May 2019 which fixed a problem with this protection that caused some pretty serious performance problems. I believe the version is 1903 ( and feel free to read up on it here -> https://www.howtogeek.com/402569/everything-new-in-windows-10s-april-2019-update/)
This might be the cause of the problem. We noticed on our windows 10 systems that we'd get only half the cores working (so a bit more than your 20% utilisation), and our AMD GPU was pretty much at 0%. Bizarrely enough, only our software was affected, rendering in Blender natively worked just fine.
Then we updated to 1903 on win 10 and the problem stopped. So I'd highly recommend that you update your software on all your nodes, if you haven't already. If you have, and you still get the problem after restarting all your computers, then please write back here. We'd love to look into this, and hope you'd be alright with us doing a video conference with you to figure out what's gone wrong.
Thanks!
James